Enrico Baj’s Meuble de Style, 1961 extends the artist’s irreverent critique of authority and taste into the domestic sphere. Composed of collaged furniture elements arranged on fabric, the work transforms familiar objects associated with comfort, refinement, and bourgeois respectability into a playful yet pointed assemblage. By collapsing distinctions between painting, sculpture, and interior décor, Baj challenges the cultural hierarchies that govern both art and everyday life. 



The title itself—an ironic play on “meuble de style,” a term used to describe furniture made in

historical revival styles—signals Baj’s skepticism toward inherited notions of elegance and tradition.

Rather than celebrating craftsmanship or lineage, Meuble de Style exposes style as a form of

masquerade, a system of visual codes that confers status and authority. Dislocated from their

functional context, the furniture fragments become signs rather than objects, stripped of use and

reassembled as visual satire.



Baj’s practice during this period was shaped by his involvement with the Nuclear Art Movement and

by his deep engagement with Dada and Surrealism. Like the Dadaists, he employed collage to disrupt logic and undermine aesthetic conventions, while Surrealism’s embrace of the uncanny is evident in the way familiar furnishings assume an almost anthropomorphic presence. At the same time, Baj’s use of humble, nontraditional materials anticipates later artistic strategies associated with Arte Povera and postwar assemblage.



Created in the early 1960s, a moment marked by economic recovery and the expansion of consumer

culture in Europe, Meuble de Style reflects a critical awareness of how objects shape social identity.

Furniture—often a marker of taste, class, and aspiration—becomes a vehicle for questioning the values embedded in material culture. By mounting these elements on fabric, Baj further destabilizes

expectations, replacing solidity and permanence with softness and contingency.



Both humorous and incisive, Meuble de Style invites viewers to reconsider the authority of style itself.

Baj reveals the domestic environment not as neutral or comforting, but as a stage upon which cultural power and conformity are performed and, through art, subverted.